Should I switch from Assimil to Books? (Advice Center) Language Learning Forum

Should I switch from Assimil to Books?
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12 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

Lykeio
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United Kingdom
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Message 9 of 12

11 December 2013 at 12:22pm | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

kanewai wrote:

French grammar seems never ending; there's always more
nuances to learn.

All grammars are neverending.

No no dear, you only say that because you're Russian. :P

I jest...I jest I know what you mean, learning forms and using them correctly all the
time takes a lot of practice and it can seem so damn daunting, but you just get there in
the end. This is why I feel grammatical synopses are helpful btw guys, because you can
see all the grammar in front of you and highlight your weak points. And practice.
1 person has voted this message useful

Serpent
Octoglot
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Message 10 of 12

11 December 2013 at 12:46pm | IP Logged

I say this as someone who loves Finnish grammar so much that when I wanted more of it, I would go to the biggest foreign language library here in Moscow and read linguistic research dealing with obscure grammar issues. I just couldn't accept that there was next to no grammar left to learn.

But yeah at some point it gets less about patterns and more about specific usage.
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YnEoS
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Message 11 of 12

11 December 2013 at 3:25pm | IP Logged

luke wrote:

That's a personal decision. It sounds like you haven't decided for sure whether to continue French in Action and you've dropped FSI.

The later lessons of French Without Toil are a good bit more challenging than the earlier ones. It really ramps up in the last 20 days. Maybe that has frightened you. It's normal to consider dropping the course at the point you're at, partly because it gets tough as well as the normal tendency not to finish a big goal like FWT (or FIA, or FSI). You have plenty of company.

One has to come back to your goals and possibly why you are considering dropping the course. If it's just hard to finish something you start, it would be a good experience to carry on for 2 more months and achieve what you set out to do. There's no question you'll learn more and that it will have been done in a systematic way with a good course. I don't think you'll regret carrying on with your original plan. Your book may be more enjoyable when you've finished the course.

Ah sorry, when I said "I'd probably continue with French in Action" I mean "I'm definitely going to go through French in Action several times" its a really fun course and one of my main goals is to watch movies in French so also very useful.

Also I wasn't ever really using FSI as part of my normal study routine, just as a way to reinforce grammar I was picking up more passively from Assimil. The lessons in the French course get to having over 90 minutes of audio per lesson and I don't like splitting up the lessons over multiple days, so I wasn't doing it simultaneously with Assimil and my intent was to do the second half of FSI after finishing Assimil for review.

I'm comfortable with my Assimil routine, I just wasn't sure if it was meant to just get you to the point where you could use native materials comfortably, or if it would be inefficient to quit the course early. I agree though I should finish the course in some form, if nothing else to set a precedent of following through with my course plans.

kanewai wrote:

I would do both, finish Assimil while you move to native materials. I remember getting impatient a bit with Assimil French at the end of the active section, and rushed a bit ... I didn't feel the need to internalize the dialogues with a lot of slang. Even still, it's useful to complete.

I'd even keep FSI on your shelf. I've been consuming a lot of native lit this past year and a half, but it still helps to do a "study month" every once in awhile. French grammar seems never ending; there's always more nuances to learn.

Actually FSI sounds like the perfect kind of course material to do after doing some reading, so I'll definitely keep it around for later to try and solidify the concepts I'm absorbing more passively through context.

Serpent wrote:

Now that I've looked at this part of your post again, maybe you need to change your Assimil methods/pace? You don't have to do a lesson every day. You don't have to do scriptorium. Don't rush through things that are too difficult. Don't dwell on things that are too easy.

Thanks, I think perhaps I'll use Assimil more casually along with reading, only using scriptorium on sentences I find difficult and want to study more carefully.
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emk
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Message 12 of 12

11 December 2013 at 3:38pm | IP Logged

EDIT: Oops, I didn't see your post when I started writing this!

YnEoS wrote:

So I'm 2 months away from completing Assimil French Without Toil and I decided to buy the French translation of John Green's The Fault In Our Stars to be the first book I'd try to read in French upon hitting intermediate because A)It's at around a high school reading level and B) I've read it recently in English and enjoyed it quite a bit.

I decided to look through it to see how much I could understand and found that I only run into 1, maybe 2 words that I don't know in each sentence and about half the time I can guess the meaning from context and the Kindle's French language definitions. Its a bit of a struggle, but also lots of fun as well, and I feel like I'm encountering much more interesting vocabulary.

Cool! It sounds like you found a really fun book, and you're itching to read it. :-) And you've just read the English version, which will help tremendously.

I read my first French book a while after completing NFWE, and it did a huge amount for my reading abilities and vocabulary. There's something really nice about a thick, interesting book—it gives you time to get used to the subject and the author, which gives a much-needed boost.

Personally, I think the right time to dive into native materials is when they're fun, and when you don't want to resist the temptation anymore. Tastyonions started using native materials ridiculously early during NFWE, far earlier than I did, and he progressed way faster than I did with just NFWE by itself.

YnEoS wrote:

So should I drop my Assimil course and just focus on trying to read this book? I don't think I've learned all the grammar points quite yet, so would it be better to finish my courses to make sure I learn everything, or maybe do a bit of both each day?

The most important thing is that you keep doing interesting things in French, and that you keep being curious (at least some of the time) about why things are expressed the way they are. The only course of action that's truly bad for your French is to stop using it completely. :-)

If you have grammar questions when you're reading, it wouldn't hurt to occasionally look things up on french.about.com or pick up a copy of the short but excellent Essential French Grammar (currently $2 on Amazon.com). If you feel weak on verb tenses, consider making one of Iversen's "green sheets"—pick a group of regular verbs (perhaps the -er verbs) and list all of their possible endings in tabular format on a single sheet of paper. Hang this somewhere on the wall near your usual reading spot. When you encounter a weird verb form, you can glance at the wall and say, "Oh, that's the conditional. OK, cool."

On the other hand, there's no reason to give up completely on your courses. Mixing fun reading with some deliberate studying is a very powerful combination: Whenever you read, you'll find examples of what you've been studying everywhere, and whenever you study your courses, you'll have lots of small moments of epiphany: "Ah, so that's the deal with celui/celle/ceux/celles! I've been seeing those everywhere."

But personally, I've found that intensive and extensive activities can be mixed up in just about any order and still provide greater benefits than either would give me on its own.

Edited by emk on 11 December 2013 at 4:18pm

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